This post was updated May 25 at 7:10 p.m.
Old habits die hard.
The 2019-2020 Daily Bruin Editorial Board’s recent piece claimed that the Cultivating Unity for Bruins Referendum’s failure resulted from “nothing more” than students’ financial concerns during this pandemic.

I have been the dean for students at UCLA for five years, and a higher education professional for 20 years. In all my years serving the University of California, I have never witnessed what we are currently experiencing.

 
COVID-19 is this generation’s first truly global pandemic. There are no vaccines or effective treatments. It is a universal threat, for now.
 
However, history suggests that with time, this universal threat will narrow its focus to the most vulnerable among us.

Graduate students at UCLA are set to go on a one-day strike Thursday. This comes in response to the firing of 82 graduate students who went on a wildcat strike for higher wages at UC Santa Cruz in December.

A plan to make students pay more money never goes over well.
But this time students barely had a chance to go over the plan in the first place.

Even at the nation’s top public university, campus spaces are not always top-notch.
From broken desks to leaky pipes, inaccessible classrooms to routine flooding, it’s easy to see how UCLA is buckling under the strain of being the second-oldest and most populous University of California campus in the system.

As the largest generation alive in this country, young people have the potential to greatly influence politics.
They also have the lowest voter turnout of any age group.